Letter to the editor: Writer’s claims have little to do with truth or fairness

When I read the title of Ken Hall’s Aug. 17 letter — “America had prosperity before Obama got power” — I thought it had to be some sort of sarcastic joke.

Apparently Fox News didn’t report the fact that the economy collapsed well before President Barack Obama was even elected, much less “got power.” In fact, the seeds of economic destruction were sown many years ago, with the massive outsourcing of jobs to China and other cheap labor havens, the deregulation of the “too big to fail” banks that became so corrupt they ran the entire financial sector off a cliff and the housing bubble that George W. Bush actually campaigned on in 2004 (remember Bush’s “Ownership Society”?).

What these partisan hacks like Hall are doing is trying to blame Obama for their own party’s horrendous failures. It’s like an arsonist who sets a house on fire, walks away and then blames the firefighters for the fire after they show up to put the fire out.

Another fallacious claim Hall makes is that North Dakota’s prosperity is due to our state being run “almost exclusively by Republicans.” I’m sorry, but unless the Republicans magically injected all that oil into the Bakken Formation, and magically controlled the weather and farm commodity prices in recent years, they have had almost nothing to do with our prosperity. Furthermore, the North Dakota Constitution mandates a balanced state budget, so for Republicans to expect praise for that is like me expecting a reward for not robbing a bank.

Incidentally, something Hall failed to mention is that he is a candidate for the state Legislature this year. My question is, do we really need yet another fact-challenged politician who has little regard for the truth or fairness? In fact, isn’t that a lot of what’s wrong in our dysfunctional government?

Brad Mills

Jamestown

Tags: opinion, letters, politics